


All Her Flaws Aside

by sequence_fairy



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Dimension hopping!Rose, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:26:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6827695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her skin is a map of her search for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Her Flaws Aside

She’s got scars now, because there’s no one around with a handy dermal regenerator and a med bay stocked with the best medical supplies in four star systems.

There are jagged lines down the inside of one arm where she caught herself against a nail sliding down a fence on the run from the military police on a planet somewhere in the outer rings of the Sombrero galaxy. 

(She was millimetres from opening her brachial artery and Rose doesn’t think about the blood, and the way it dripped down her hand and onto the pavement beneath her feet like it was a ticking clock on a countdown.)

There’s a puckered divot in her low back, to the left, just under her ribs. It has a matching mark on her front; a splash of pink near her belly button. A through-and-through that should have killed her, and she’s still not sure how she got back to Earth through the Void. She remembers kind eyes and gentle hands and a searing pain that made her retch and then nothing for a still uncounted stretch of time.  

(Her mother made her quit for three months after that and Rose will never get the ashen cast of Mickey’s face out of her mind.)

There are others, less life-threatening, but those are just the ones on the outside.

Inside, she is covered in scar tissue. She has  _ seen _ things. She has done (and not done) things that still make her guts twist and her nights white. There are locked doors in her mind that even she won’t open and she’s absurdly grateful that travelling with the Doctor and losing him taught her how to compartmentalize.

She wonders sometimes if this is how he managed too. If the locked doors in his mind fill hallway after hallway, ‘cause she imagines that he’s seen things and done things (and chosen not to do things) the same way that she has. She understands now, she thinks, more than she did when she was travelling with him, exactly what this kind of a life does to a person.

The weight of it just tears you apart, and if she let it, it would make her hard. Make her hard the way she watched it make Jack hard, the way she thinks the Doctor let it make him hard before she took his hand and said  _ there’s me _ . All of the choosing to act and choosing not to, and knowing when to step in and when to let things run their course - because even though she’s looking for him, she can’t just walk away when a situation goes south under her nose - it leaves its mark.

She shoulders it like she shoulders the weight of the blaster in the holster up against her side, and puts one foot in front of the other, and continues on, striding parallel to parallel, chasing the telltale signature on the dimension cannon that says she’s on the right path.

She doesn’t let herself wonder what he’ll think of what she’s become, doesn’t think about how right her mother was as she’s standing in a market on one of the free moons of Japeth, looking at her reflection and no longer recognizing the woman staring back at her.

“Buying or selling?” the shopkeeper asks in the rasp of his people, and Rose blinks, and turns away from herself.

“Neither,” she answers, “just passing through.”

“Get moving then,” the shopkeeper growls, gesturing one long fingered hand at the sign over the door.  _ No Loitering _ it says to Rose’s eyes, but she knows it’s in the eerily familiar, almost cyrillic script they use in the Commonwealth. Rose steps out of his booth, and into the brilliant sun.

She ducks into the next alley and starts the countdown. She takes a breath, closes her eyes and feels the world shrink into nothing as she is flung through the Void. The sizzling energy of the cannon lights up the damaged nerves in her arm, pain signals rocketing up into her brain and leaving her gasping when she arrives, in another alley, on another planet.

She adjusts her holster under her jacket, pockets the cannon, and steps out of the alley, one foot in the front of the other. Each step brings her closer to him, each step brings her closer to home.

(She’ll have so many more scars before she finds him, both inside and out, but when he strips her out of the leather jacket and jeans and tugs her shirt up over her head, she forgets all of them in the heat of his lips on her neck and the gentle caress of his hands on her skin. He traces the lines marring her flesh with wonder and pain in his eyes and she tells him what she can about how she got them and he vows, silently, that there won’t be a chance for her to get anymore.)


End file.
